Resurgence and Revolution
by James Jago
Summary: An optimistic Post-Gauder Prime situation with Blake surviving, his rabble strinking a great hammerblow against the Federation, and even a few romantic and quasi-funny bits.


I make no claim of ownership of any of the characters contained in this story, even the ones I made up (I don't mind if anyone else borrows them so long as they don't whinge about me borrowing theirs) and I am writing this story with no commercial purpose in mind- in fact I'm doing this mostly for my own amusement. This also explains any errors, implausibilities, or the resurrection of several characters that are surely dead.  
  
Acknowledgements: My girlfriend Amber, for telling me about Fanfiction (anyone reading this, please have a look at her Thunderbirds stuff!)  
Mr Hawkins, head of ICT, for letting me use the school's E-mail.  
John Clark and the RAINBOW team, for teaching me everything I know about CQB tactics.  
The various other Blake's 7 fanfic writers who've given me ideas (especially the author of 'Punch and Circumstance, which is repeatedly alluded to)  
Everyone who has read this and not flamed it mercilessly.  
Resurgence and Revolution  
  
Avon was dimly aware that he had fired. He staggered under Blake's weight, catching him as he fell.  
"Avon," he croaked. "I haven't... betrayed you!" The guards gestured menacingly at the others. Vila dropped ORAC on his foot, Sulin drew her sidearm and Dayna swung out with a boot, catching one guard in the shin. He fired reflexively, missing everyone. Dayna smashed a fist into his abdomen and he doubled over, still firing at nothing in particular but causing everybody to duck. Sulin, meanwhile, took the opportunity to put a shot into Arlen's retreating back.  
"This is all your damn fault!" Tarant screamed at Avon, his normal composure disintegrating. "We're all dead thanks to you, you idiot!"  
"Everybody hold fire, and get a medical team down here. Move!" shouted an apparently senior person. Avon regained a few of his wits, and decided to run for it.  
"Hey, stop right there!" yelled one guard, beginning to pursue. Vila overtook him, grabbing a chair and hurling it. It took Avon in the back, pitching him to the deck.  
"Take that, you crazy murdering bastard!" said Vila with a degree of venom the others had never heard before.  
A pair of medics carried Blake away on a gurney, IV tubes stuck in him, and a guard hauled the unconscious Avon off towards the cells.  
"He's a lucky man," remarked one of the guards laconically. "If he'd killed Blake he'd be dead by now."  
"You aren't Federation, then?"  
"No, we just borrowed a few uniforms and weapons off the real ones. It's a standard trick, makes Federation agents like her," the guard indicated Arlen, "tip their hand. I'll explain later."  
  
Avon came around nearly twelve hours later. He slowly analysed his situation.  
//Hmmm, so... I'm in a cell. No new experience for me, not by a long chalk.  
Explanation: Blake did betray us, the Federation have got us in their clutches, and I'm awaiting 'trial'. Unlikely, with the criminal record I've amassed they wouldn't waste their time or mine.  
Explanation: Servalan has got hold of us and wants us for her own reasons. Possible, I suppose. Hmm, on the whole I prefer the first option.  
Explanation: Blake was telling the truth, and I'm in seriously deep shit for killing him, or trying to. On the other hand, if he's alive he might reprieve me. He always was a sentimentalist...//  
The door slid aside, revealing two heavily armed men. Avon looked up, suddenly acutely conscious that he had made a lot of people very, very annoyed.  
"Mr Blake wants a word with you," said one of them.  
  
In a small waiting room adjacent to the medical wing of the base, the others were trying to sort out the sequence of events in their own minds. ORAC appeared to be offline after getting a rough time at the hands of fate. One got the distinct impression that he was sulking.  
"If he isn't out for the price on our heads, then why did he shoot down Scorpio and try to kill us?" asked Vila logically.  
"He wasn't to know we were coming," countered Dayna. "We could have been anyone. The 'open planet' status on this place calls for some pretty tough law enforcement."  
"Huh, yes, law enforcement," Vila retorted. This was a concept he had little regard for.  
"Well, whatever his motives are, I'm out of here. This is the final bloody straw. Blake can take all his plans of resistance and overthrow and shove them up-," Tarant began emphatically, but he was interrupted as the door opened and an aide of some sort entered.  
"Mr Blake wants a word with you."  
  
The four of them were brought to a small room in this base's medical bay. Blake, heavily bandaged but smiling, was sitting up in a hospital bed talking earnestly with another man.  
"Ah. Vila, Dayna, good to see you both. And these two are-?"  
"This is Del Tarant, who we met up with a while after we lost contact," Vila introduced calmly. "And Sulin is a native of this world. Who's your friend?"  
"This is Chris, a colleague of mine from a long time back before the original Freedom Party was destroyed," Blake replied. Chris smiled briefly and inclined his head. He was of average height and build, with unruly brown hair and a small scar running from the bridge of his nose to his cheekbone.  
Sulin's eyes flashed with recognition. Chris felt himself begin to blush.  
"Hi."  
"Hi."  
"How's Dorian? Did you find out how old he really was?" Sulin didn't really know how to answer that.  
Vila and Tarant exchanged knowing looks, and Dayna stifled a giggle. Blake remained impassive. Fortunately for everybody's dignity, a knock sounded at the door. A guard entered first, followed by Avon. A second guard brought up the rear.  
"Avon! Good to see you back with us again after that little holiday from reality," said Blake, a slightly brittle edge to his manner. "Now that you're back in possession of what passes for your sanity I'd like you to hear this.  
"After we were separated I returned to Earth, hoping to rouse up some resistance. We retain contacts with several hundred small cells in the Sol system, and many more of the major colonies. We're still trying to make contact with more. Things didn't work out too well on Earth, and we had to get out in a hurry. However, I've had a lot of time to think about a definite overall strategy for taking the Federation down. It will take years to prepare for, but when we're ready we'll go through them like an axe through an egg carton!"  
The others listened with interest. If he was this florid Blake must have something pretty special in mind.  
"Once we establish links with resistance groups on every world, they will receive a message telling them to begin a one-month-on, two-months-off sequence of activity," Chris explained. "The Federation won't be able to deploy their forces adequately, so they'll be dashing about trying to wipe out resistance on one world only to have it flare up on another. The majority of the fleet will be concerned with the frontier worlds since they have fewer home defences. This should leave the inner systems relatively undefended."  
"And when they're all off trying to stop our colleagues nibbling them to death, we'll strike right at the heart of the Federation!" added Blake emphatically, smashing a fist into his palm. "If we can take even one important world then they will have to deal with us on our terms. We can negotiate a peace treaty, get ourselves recognised. And, once they feel safe enough to let down their guard, we'll hit them so hard they won't even have time to start an argument about who's fault it all is!"  
The others were impressed. Even Avon let out a low whistle, perturbed as he was by the mad gleam in Blake's eye.  
"It will take years before we achieve a complete victory, but we will in the end. If they try and counterattack we can just step up resistance activity on the other worlds. To take back Earth or another world would cost them a dozen more. We'd have to be patient, but the buggers can't hold out forever," Chris said with a smile.  
"The problem is that we lack ships. We have the use of a few small shuttles, but nothing we can use in battle."  
"Now, there we may be able to help a little. Our ship may not be salvageable, but if she can be repaired then I have no problem with helping you in any way we can," said Avon. "Of course, I can't speak for the rest of you," he added to the others.  
"I'm in!" said Vila.  
"Wouldn't dream of saying no, not after what the Federation did to my home world," said Sulin bitterly. They didn't even need to ask Dayna.  
"Tarant?" asked Blake.  
"It's quite clear I've lost my mind," the ex-Federation officer replied. "Because you can count me in on this one."  
"Thanks," said Blake. "Avon, I always knew you're an idealist at heart."  
"Yes, but I know that there's always been a big gap between what is ideal and what is conceivably attainable, until now." Avon paused. "It's... good to be working with you again, Blake."  
"God, I must have hit him harder than I thought," remarked Vila.  
Avon joined in the general laugh that followed. It wasn't his usual laugh. It lacked any bitterness or irony, and nothing horrible had happened to anyone; which was generally what was required to make Avon laugh. This however was a genuine, amused laugh, the laugh of a perfectly sane man who has heard a good joke. It occurred to the others, as well as the permanently detached, analytical part of Avon's mind, that he had negotiated the rapids of Stress, gone over the waterfall of Insanity and landed in the deep pool at the bottom without breaking anything.  
  
The next day, a battered old wheeled personnel transport rolled to a halt in front of the wreck of Scorpio.  
The obsolescent Wanderer class design was well suited to their purposes. It was actually derived from an assault force-carrier ship, intended for broadly the same role as a seagoing tank landing ship, or LST. The Federation fleet had tried a prototype and found it outstandingly effective, but for a task they had no need to perform. Without any invasions on the agenda, the Federation bought and mothballed eight examples, and made numerous improvements and modifications to them to keep them abreast of current technology.  
The manufacturers made a few adjustments to the assembly line and marketed the result as a cargo hauler. It was large and capacious, fast for its size and capable of planetary landing operation. Luckily for Blake's plans they had made provision for it to be converted back to its original design role without excessive technical difficulty. However if a ship of this design had been shot up and crashed into a planet it became a lot trickier.  
  
Scorpio was in a bad way. The once-streamlined hull was covered with burn marks and holes, as well as a number of huge dents from the spectacular forced-landing. Streaks of carbon along radiating from one engine outlet indicated that at least one drive was a clear wreck.  
Thirty-odd repair and salvage experts moved in, dragging antigravity lifters loaded with spare parts behind them. Avon went with one team to assist in bringing the shipboard computer, SLAVE, back online, leaving the others staring morosely at the hulk of their old ship.  
"Effective little bastards, those gunships," said Tarant bitterly.  
"Oh, don't you worry. Our techs are some of the best in the galaxy," replied Chris. "If they can find enough bits on the same planet they can put her back together."  
The communicator on the transport's dashboard beeped. Blake, who had been enjoying a quiet smoke in the cab out of the oncoming rain, picked up the handset.  
"Blake here."  
"Maynard, sir. I've just had a look at the damage report from the onboard computer, and she isn't in as bad a state as she looks."  
"I should hope not!"  
"Most of the outer hull panels will need replacing, but the airframe's perfectly sound. The reactor powering the internal systems was knocked about some, but I think we can fix that. Give us maybe ninety minutes and we can patch up one engine enough to get the ship back to base for a proper repair. We'll have to do a full overhaul on her, but this old rust bucket should survive."  
"Excellent!" said Blake. In the background he could hear SLAVE protesting at the 'old rust bucket' remark.   
  
Precisely eighty-seven minutes later, Scorpio limped back to the hangar of Blake's base of operations. The old ship was to spend several months there being adapted for warfare.  
The crew found Blake sitting in a small office near the repair section. He was apparently in conference with ORAC.  
"Ah, I was hoping to show you this," he said, businesslike. "ORAC, you remember those files I asked you to look after?"  
"Of course I remember them!" replied ORAC irritably.  
"Charming as ever, I see. Could you put them on the screen, please?" Blake replied a little testily. "File eleven forty-five Echo, I think." ORAC brought up file 1145 Echo, and put it on a large wall screen.  
"Oh. That doesn't appear to be it." Everybody went a little red.  
"Vila, that was a terrible thing you did with that punch. Avon looks utterly ridiculous in that fake beard, and although that waistcoat and tights are rather becoming, Tarant, the wig really isn't you." Blake tried not to smile.  
ORAC had no internal visual sensors, so he couldn't see Avon's expression (or Tarant's as he had his face in his hands and was moaning to himself), but he registered the ominous silence from that quarter. "I believe that this was the file you had in mind," he cut in hastily. The quite indescribable picture of Vila's little Christmas prank was replaced by a complex and impressive-looking set of plans, statistics and other remarkable engineering things that made no immediate sense.  
However ORAC, by way of some rather elegant camera effects that he had carefully practiced and was quite proud of, coalesced the jumble of diagrams into a 3D wireframe model of a very familiar-looking spacecraft.  
The main structure bore a vague resemblance to a Belisha beacon; a bulbous engine array connected to a long central spar. From this projected three wings at 120o angles, with a large neutron blaster tipping each of them. If you haven't already figured it out, the ship bore a striking resemblance to Liberator.  
"Where did you get these plans?" asked Dayna.  
"Taking internal scans, making notes, looking at the layout plan. Working out a few parts ourselves," Blake replied. "ORAC proved most helpful, I might add. He responds well to a little politeness, don't you ORAC? Of course," he added with a laugh, "holding a gun on him helps as well."  
Avon smiled in that inimitable way of his that made most people, Vila in particular, want to go and hide.  
"I've never tried that, though it has crossed my mind occasionally," he said tonelessly. ORAC was incapable of swallowing nervously but he would have done so had at this point he been able to.  
"In fact, I've modified the design slightly. Notice those small turrets; they're for close range flanking cover and point defence," Blake continued smoothly. "It isn't especially clear on a wireframe schematic, but there are two hangar bays which can carry a squadron of gunships of the type you saw in action. There's also room for troops aboard, but in the various invasion strategies we've put together the Wanderers will take the lion's share. These ships will engage the defence fleet whilst the Wanderers blast their way to the surface and deploy our ground forces."  
"How many are you aiming to construct?" asked Vila.  
"Three at least. We also aim to obtain the eight troop-carrier prototypes of the Wanderer via front purchasers for independent worlds who sympathise with us. Gives us twelve in total. A nice round number, don't you think?" said Chris, who had wandered in at some stage in the proceedings. "We estimate we'll have room for at least two thousand troops, mostly mechanised, as well as three tank companies and two squadrons of combat aircraft." He paused, and thought for a moment. "Oh, that reminds me, they've just put together one of the first consignment of fighters. They're about to flight test it now. Care to come and watch?"  
  
The aircraft they were presented with appeared to be built without one curve on it. The fuselage was blocky, but tapered to a sharp point. The effect was of the Washington Monument knocked over onto one side and painted a dull grey. Two wide delta wings were mounted high on the body, and a single large tail fin projected from the rear. The air intakes for the turbine engines were on either side of the low bubble canopy. The engines themselves were inside the fuselage, and only their outlets could be seen at the rear of the main body of the aircraft.  
"Nice, except for the colour," Vila remarked. "What armament does it carry?"  
"The wing pylons can hold just about anything. Air-to-air missiles, air-to-surface, rockets, cluster bombs, napalm, the works," said Chris. "As well as all that lot, there are two plasma cannons just forward of the cockpit, and this."  
The fighter rose a few feet into the air on low power takeoff jets, and hovered. Chris waved to the demonstration pilot, who was in the rear seat.  
A stubby cylinder extruded from the belly of the fighter. From it six short barrels slid outwards. The cylinder swivelled, and pointed at a tree visible outside the launch bay. There was a deafening roar, and a disproportionately small spurt of flame from the now fast-rotating barrels.  
The tree crashed to the forest floor a moment later.  
"Nice old fashioned weapon system, projectile throwers like this. More accurate than they look, and the heat signature from firing is quite small. A thermal scanner can spot a laser being fired a mile away, but this thing's unnoticeable at less than a few yards," observed Tarant.  
"That's what we thought," replied Blake. "That particular example isn't especially high-calibre but it'll make a mess of a ground vehicle. How many rounds do you think it fired?"  
They all tried various guesses, mostly ranging from sixty to one hundred-forty.  
"Actually, it was closer to four hundred. Almost all standard Federation weapons can't manage that in an hour, let alone five seconds or so. Extremely handy, don't you think?"  
"Especially when two squadrons of them are blasting hell out of all your positions. This thing is an all-purpose fighter; ground attack, air combat, reconnaissance. The nearest Federation equivalent is their GP 38, which is slower and a lot less manoeuvrable than this beauty."  
"What about that new fighter, the HIS something-or-other?" asked Avon.  
"The H.S.I 57, yes. That could probably defeat these in a dogfight, but it hasn't been fully deployed yet. It won't be issued until the current design is up for replacement."  
"The ADF 21 is fast and well armed, but our fighter has a far superior beyond-visual-range weapons system. With a little luck our pilots should be able to ruin their day before they even see us," Chris replied with a hint of smugness. "By the way, we call it the Sparrowhawk. A bit more interesting than just giving them an alphanumeric code, hmm?"  
Blake smiled. "It was a lucky find. An independent world was trying to sell the design to the Federation, but they settled on the H.S.I 57 instead. We managed to get hold of a couple dozen and some spares. Fortunately a lot of parts are interchangeable with Federation fighters so that isn't going to be a problem."  
"The design they decided on has no interchangeable parts with any other fighter whatsoever. That's Federation logic," added the Sparrowhawk's pilot, as he climbed from the cockpit. "If they were all as thick as the Acquisitions and Improvements committee we'd have an easy ride!" Nobody could dispute that.  
  
The next six months were hectic. The first of the samples of vehicle had arrived and been tested. Crews were being trained, but they were still short of manpower. Scorpio was operational again, and had conducted several weapon tests on asteroids towed from Gauder Prime's small orbital debris ring, not a natural feature but a result of foolish and ill-considered dumping of waste material from the huge orbital refineries built by the big mining corporations who had once marred the planet with their operation.  
Only one of these corporations, a small Earth-based company owned by one of the few survivors of Blake's ill-fated Freedom Party, still had interests here. The CEO and Blake had reached an agreement; He would take a bit more care over the ecology of the planet, and Blake's group would make his company their first choice of supplier for materials to build the new design of cruiser, which became known as the Zodiac class.  
They had only managed to get hold of two proper assault-landing ships, so the shortcoming was being made up with additional Wanderer conversion jobs. Only three had been obtained so far, and they were in a poor state of repair when they arrived. The Mk II design was getting on a bit now, and most of their taskforce's troopships were ultimately sourced from salvage yards.  
Which was not to say that they were ineffective. After some truly remarkable work from the maintenance crews, the first such example was undergoing a test run prior to outfitting with weapons. The second and third were expected to follow in a fortnight or so. Blake was extremely pleased with the progress that was being made.  
"In the next few weeks," he addressed his crew (he still thought of them as such though they hadn't shared a ship for two years) "Scorpio will be ready to engage the enemy for the first time." Avon and Vila exchanged looks; Blake was getting into this role far too much, he was even starting to talk like an admiral.  
"In recent years, the Federation has got downright complacent about guarding their convoys. One of our craft can easily neutralise their usual escort strength, capture at least one cargo ship, and make off with its cargo before the dust has settled," Blake continued. "Our intelligence resources are scant to put it mildly, but we do know that a large shipment of military and other supplies will be en route to a newly settled colony soon. We will be ready by then.  
"Without looking at the manifests it's impossible to say specifically what is aboard, but it is almost certain that we can use some of what we'll come away with. Much of what we can't use we may be able to trade or sell, but whatever happens the Federation won't be able to use any of it."  
"Fine in theory, but Scorpio isn't a bulk cargo hauler. We shan't be able to carry away much," remarked Tarant.  
"Only one of the ships in the convoy is carrying munitions. If you can escort it to a suitable rendezvous point our other ships can take on whatever your own ship can't. It would be best if you can force them to jettison their cargo and let them go before the others arrive; Wanderers aren't all that common and somebody is bound to wonder about us having so many, especially since they convert to troopships so easily." He looked at them all, becoming sombre for a few moments.  
"You're the best people I've got. Nobody stands a better chance than you. Now," he said, his normal businesslike manner returning. "Let's get this planned down to the last detail..."  
  
"Main armament reporting in. Turrets one through four optimal."  
"Secondary armament shows full readiness."  
"Missile tubes ready fore and aft."  
"Drives one and two running at full capacity, auxiliary power at ninety-six percent and fluctuating by about point three. Hmm. Backup generator's still warming up, should be running at full any time... now! Aux power full."  
Avon listened to the series of status reports without showing any outward sign of it, but he was extremely pleased. He was in command of a powerful ship, with a good crew, and he was about to remind the Federation why he was high up on their Most Wanted list.  
SLAVE too was feeling cheerful, if it was possible for a computer to experience that emotion. His ship, his 'body' as he thought of it, hadn't been in such good condition for years, and it had weapons! For a personality that had been shot at and knocked about more times than he could count, being able to throw something back at last was a good feeling.  
No small measure of credit for his good humour was due to the expert cybernetics team who had done some major systems improvements. Vila joked about how SLAVE had 'had his self-confidence software upgraded,' and this was close to the truth. Some subtle tweaks, with SLAVE's consent, had been made to the complex set of circuitry that made up his personality and had given him a greater degree of freedom of expression and action than previously.  
Just like Scorpio's previous owner to make his shipboard computer permanently servile and self-doubting, Vila thought to himself, pausing in his check of the portside rear missile tube. A man who locks up his wine is a man to view with suspicion. He didn't even know I was coming... Come on Vila old son; keep your mind on what you're doing!  
"Coordinates set, ready to execute hyper-jump."  
"Right," said Avon. He smiled that terrifying smile of his. "All hands, hyperspace stations. Let's go!"  
  
The convoy was strung out in a long line, watched over rather negligently by a pair of elderly corvettes. The captain of the lead freighter, the Europa Pioneer, wondered idly if they would be any help in a crisis. Sod all, he concluded. He was right.  
"Bridge, scanners. There's a contact closing that looks like a Wanderer Mk II, but the power readings are too high... Oh, bloody hell!"  
Scorpio came within visual range.   
She was much changed. Four gun turrets flanked her main structure in over-under fashion, each packing two plasma cannons. Smaller turrets pointed outwards from the broad wing-like gunwales. Four missile tubes were immediately visible from this angle. She had been given a long-overdue repaint as well, becoming a menacing shade of metallic dark blue.  
  
The Europa Pioneer's captain took exactly five thousandths of a second to grasp the implications, and began shouting orders.  
"Helm, evasive action! Comm., inform our escort that we have sighted a pirate vessel and are attempting to evade. Request assistance urgently!"  
The corvettes, to their credit, had already reacted, opening fire with their main laser emplacements in an effort to divert attention from the convoy. Their shots went wide, but they had the effect of giving Scorpio's crew pause.  
"Shit! We've been spotted. Looks like our power signature isn't quite so low-profile after all," reported the XO (Tarant).  
"So much for the plan, then. We'll just have to improvise," Avon replied, apparently unfazed. "Sound general quarters. Weapons, do you have a solution on the corvettes yet?"  
"Nearly, nearly... gotcha! Solutions ready, sir."  
"Assign them to tubes one and two, and fire!" Avon ordered, a savage exultation gripping him.  
"Fire tubes one and two, aye sir." A slight tremor ran through the ship as the missiles jetted away. They immediately began searching for targets with the same electronic signature as the corvettes, found them, and homed in. The weapons officer had had the sense to program them so that they did not lock onto the same corvette, and they both found one each.  
The corvettes began swerving, attempting to avoid the danger. A desperate barrage of point defence flak surrounded the missiles, but to no avail. The missiles closed to within a few metres of their targets and their proximity sensors triggered the warheads.  
Blake had explicitly forbidden the use of tactical nuclear warheads even for exo-atmospheric use, but they were hardly needed. The quantity of high-grade explosive and- if deemed necessary- shaped charge-style nosecones made the missiles fitted to all Blake's fleet capable of putting quite a dent in a planet, let alone an enemy ship. The level of explosive force was near to one kiloton, and at close range the explosions gutted both corvettes. They cartwheeled away, neither apparently under command, and escape capsules scattered from one. It blew apart a few moments later.  
The freighters began to run, but another pair of missiles detonated in front of the leader. They took the hint and powered down their engines.  
The freighter carrying the military supplies was towards the rear of the convoy. It was a large, boxy ship named the Devil's Advocate, and evidently incapable of endo-atmospheric flight. Avon addressed it directly on the distress frequency.  
"Attention Federation military presence aboard this ship. If you abandon ship along with the civilian crew you will not be harmed. If not, you will be dealt with as hostile and you may suffer considerable loss of life."  
"You'd better deal with us as hostile, sunbeam!" a voice shouted over the ship's master pleading for them to spare his crew. "We'll fight you to the last-!" There was a brief interlude, during which a violent quarrel could be heard over the communicator. It became increasingly heated, finally descended into an exchange of personal abuse and concluded with a single shot.  
"Right, now that's sorted out, you listen to me..." Avon gave up, and cut the transmission.  
"Helm, take us in closer. Get the boarding tube ready, we're going to have to take her by force."  
  
Near the main airlock, twenty specialist assault squads were checking their equipment.  
Each was armed with a small compact rapid-fire weapon, whose design borrowed heavily from the gun designed by the man known as 'Dorian' (such an appalling pun could hardly be coincidental, surely?). Each gun had a variety of magazine types to fit it, and could fire just about anything, such as lasers, high energy plasma, solid projectiles, micro-grenades, or even tranquilliser darts.  
They were currently loaded with the latter, though 'tranquilliser' isn't exactly accurate. The darts, which were capable of piercing light body armour, carried a chemical that blocked voluntary nerve actions, as well as a small amount of a certain hormone that mildly accelerated heart rate and hastened the dart's effect. Those it hit were left conscious but unable to move except for blinking, but their body functions remained intact. It wore off after a few hours, and had no lasting side effects, though since you also retained bladder control you would probably need to relieve yourself quite urgently when you came around.  
The team's sidearms were similarly loaded, and their belt kit and webbing were festooned with various essentials like stun grenades, field dressings and small amounts of plastique to take the lock off a door. They all wore body armour, which would stop a Federation particle beam rifle's blast from inflicting lethal injury, though it would knock you over quite easily.  
Sulin surveyed her troops. They were good; they'd spent months training, rehearsing for virtually any situation from rescuing prisoners to storming Federation Space-Central. She smiled faintly; that would be one to tell the grandchildren about.  
"OK, folks, lets go. Just like we practiced. Split by our teams and sweep every compartment. Be careful, there's going to be a lot of civilians in there."  
The boarding tube locked in position, equalised pressure, and let the troops in. Sulin ran across it, opened the outer airlock door and checked the compartment. It was empty.  
"Clear!" she called back to the others. They followed. Vila examined the inner door critically. He was carrying additional explosives and his lock picking equipment, as well as a larger and more powerful gun; his job was to provide suppressing fire. Three other members of the squad were filling the same role.  
"I can't get at the circuitry from this side, there's not much I can do with it. It'll need a lot of explosives to open," he said thoughtfully. "You might want to stand back a bit."  
Half a minute later, he had a substantial charge rigged on the hinges and the locking mechanism.  
"Fire in the hole!" The inner airlock door was blown right into the opposite bulkhead. A 'flashbang'- a type of grenade that produces a ferocious bang and blinding flash of light and makes most people curl up into a ball and pray- followed it. Three of the squad entered the compartment, and swept the room with their weapons.  
"Clear!"  
"Clear!"  
"Clear!"  
At this, the rest followed. They split up by teams of five, four assaulters and one demolitionist/heavy machine gunner. Each had a designated section of the ship to check, aided by blueprints of a ship of identical design, and they knew that the guard force was probably spread too thinly to provide any effective resistance.  
They had a standard operating procedure that had been created from long sessions of trial and error. The door to a compartment would be forced, with explosives if necessary but a good solid kick normally did the job, and a flashbang tossed in. Then the assaulters would move in, with the heavy gunner ready to loose off a burst at any large groups of hostiles. Once the room was secure, and flexi cuffs applied to those who had surrendered or were wounded- they were normally given sufficient medical aid to prevent them from bleeding to death- the team would move on.  
They met their first resistance near the bridge. The guards, realising that they were up against experts in swift assault and close-quarters-battle (CQB), had sensibly decided to fall back to important areas; the command deck, main engine room and hold. They had also thought to find some large laser cannons of the sort used for fixed defence, mounted on bipods and able to fire millisecond-long pulses in rapid succession. The civilian crew had already been evacuated, so they were free to raise hell.  
  
Sulin carefully peered out from behind a heavy steel door that her squad had dragged over as a makeshift barricade. She immediately threw herself to the floor as the big gun one hundred yards down the corridor opened fire. A mixture of smoke from burning electrical systems and tear gas from the canisters they had found in storage was floating around, and the individual beams of energy were clearly visible. In other circumstances it would have been quite pretty.  
Vila was trying a little plan of his own devising. He had dismantled a flashbang with a screwdriver from his lock picking kit, and was removing the flash powder. Then he stuck a big lump of plastic explosive in the space and screwed the impromptu hand grenade back together.  
"You all might want to keep your heads down, if this thing goes off it'll go very off," he warned, and hurled the grenade as hard as he could.  
The explosive force of plastique is disproportionately large relative to quantity. Vila had used enough to knock out a tank, and there was little left of the gun or its operator, the two men with him, or the room they were in after the echoes of the explosion died away. Only the hull auto-seal, filling the small gap between the double hulls of Devil's Advocate, prevented a catastrophic air leak.  
"Nice thinking, Vila, but use a little less high explosive next time," said Sulin, once the ringing had stopped. "Come on, people, we've got to keep moving!"  
They carried on through the compartment that Vila had just devastated, trying not to look at what they were treading in.  
  
Within an hour it was all over. The surviving Federation troops, those who had been incapacitated by the stun guns or surrendered, were dumped unceremoniously in the remaining escape capsules and released. The surviving corvette retrieved them and covered the convoy's retreat. Avon composed a brief message to Blake informing them of success, and requesting permission to bring Devil's Advocate back to Gauder Prime and avoiding the lengthy process of cargo transfer.  
Blake consented, and they returned straight home to a hero's welcome.  
  
Scorpio's landing at Base could truly be called a triumphal entry- though when Tarant described it as such the Obscene Publications Act prevents me from repeating any of Vila's jokes.  
Blake was well pleased, and the celebrations on their return were considerable. Even Avon joined in the fun, and planned a light-hearted little practical joke inspired by certain indignities foisted upon Tarant and himself some months back...  
  
"YOU DID WHAT TO VILA?" Blake exploded.  
"Drugged him and left him out there," Avon replied.  
"Tied to a tree, bollock naked and painted green?"  
"Yes. Look, you saw what he did to us, didn't you. This is payback," Tarant protested. "He'll be all right. It's a mild day, and somebody's bound to rescue him eventually."  
"Yes, you two are. Right now," said Blake. "Or there will be trouble." His voice was full of unspoken threats. Even Avon was rather worried.  
"Err, y-e-e-s, but the thing is," Tarant explained sheepishly, visibly wilting under Blake's glare. "We were fairly drunk, you see, and-"  
"We can't remember where we left him," Avon finished.  
"Left who?" asked Vila as he wandered in. Avon and Tarant had hoped to keep the pretence up for a little longer, but it was no longer possible. Blake's expression was ample compensation for having him roaring with laughter at Vila's prank.  
Avon was doubled up and shaking with laughter. Some part of him realised that this wasn't his usual style.  
Blake noticed this as well; something in his friend had been released from beneath the layers of fear, stress and crippling nervous and physical exhaustion. He was still the same icily controlled man on the outside, but there was evidence of the human being beneath. Blake looked steadily at his friend, and then began to laugh as well.  
***  
The President of the Terran Federation was not a happy man right now. And when he was not a happy man people got arrested, tortured to death and buried in quicklime if he did not become a happy man once again in short order.  
"Do we have any idea who is responsible for this?"  
"Could be anyone, sir. Some bunch of space pirates who've got hold of an old Wanderer Mk II and put some weapons on her. Chances are almost all of the freighter's cargo will go on the black market. It's regrettable, but not a serious security threat as far as we can tell," replied the President's chief of staff.  
"Vaughn, you are bullshitting me. I've read the reports, and these 'pirates' cleared that ship like the best of our Space Assault Corps. They were better trained and better equipped than our own bloody forces and I will not tolerate this ever happening again!" The President brought his fist crashing into the top of his desk. Vaughn visibly quailed, but rallied magnificently.  
"Deserters, ex-servicemen turned mercenaries or a mixture of both, sir. That's what our military intelligence people reckon, anyhow, and there doesn't seem to be any other likely explanation," he suggested. The President replied with a hollow laugh.  
"Military intelligence, now there's a contradiction in terms! What about the unlikely explanations?"  
"Maybe they're self-taught. Academy textbooks on tactics aren't classified; I bought my brother a hardback copy of one for his birthday last year. Or an independent world might be sponsoring them, training their forces. God knows it's hardly a new trick, war by proxy. We do it all the time, somebody must have decided there's a certain rough justice in nicking the idea off us."  
"Two points, Vaughn," said the President. "First, your brother is a sad bastard. Second, this isn't helping us find out where these pirates came from and where they are now. Once your people have answers to both questions, I want to know immediately. And tell the Supreme Commander as well; he can figure out what I'll want done for himself easily enough."  
"We may have to risk another convoy in order to achieve this, sir, but it'll be a price worth paying if it works. A spy drone can clamp onto their hull and beam their location to us."  
"And if it doesn't work you will be singing high soprano for the rest of your life," warned the President, making meaningful gestures with a small letter-opener.  
  
He never went through with this threat, but the attacks continued. Partisan forces on every planet in the Federation raided weapons storage depots and handed over their contents- except for what they themselves needed- to Blake. He sold off whatever his own growing force did not require to anyone who could pay. As the terra nostra and other unpleasant groups started getting hold of military equipment several high-ranking officers in the Federation Security Service suffered nervous collapse.  
The spy drone plan misfired after one Wanderer- they were using all of them now- escorted a cargo hauler to a rendezvous point. Another ship spotted it and gave the alarm, and it was destroyed before the returned to Gauder Prime. It became obvious that the Federation's unknown enemy was fighting too smart for that kind of trick, and that to adequately defend convoys required more forces than they could spare. Arms could only be moved aboard no lesser warship than a destroyer.  
Construction of the Zodiac class cruisers continued apace, a small shipyard well outside Federation space doing the honours. Each of the ships in the taskforce had been named after a star sign, an idea that appealed to Blake's poetic side and seemed deeply meaningful without anyone ever deciding what it actually meant.  
After about a year, they had an impressive coup. An anonymous individual high up in Space Command offered their services via ORAC. He was unable to establish the transmission's origin, and they did dozens of psychological profiles on the brief message, offering to make trouble from within the Administration in exchange for an extremely large sum to be deposited in a bank account on a neutral world, but they came up with nothing. However this was fine by Blake- one who wanted to be known as a hero wasn't in it for personal gain, and politics wasn't usually a good motivation in a traitor.  
"A mercenary like this one is the best sort of spy. No attacks of guilt, no sense of betrayal. It's like the difference between hiring a hooker and fooling around with other people's wives, you know what I mean?" he explained. "That might be putting it a little coarsely but you get the picture."  
Avon of course was rather dubious, but since this agent was not actually receiving any information about their plans or giving them much possibly falsified information (when they did provide intelligence no payment was requested for it, probably a good sign) a betrayal couldn't hurt them militarily. The agent's offer was accepted and they received the codename "Phoenix".  
The precise nature of the promised internal strife was uncertain; it might be a bomb blast in the Council chamber, or a subtler tactic like stirring a few personal rivalries. There was enough sniping and backstabbing as things stood, heaven knew.  
Another eighteen months passed. The cruisers were finished, crewed with volunteers and made ready. Troops and armour were loaded aboard the wanderers, and the fleet's tactics rehearsed until they knew every step of the plan and several contingencies.  
  
Their schedule had to be accelerated when "Phoenix" sent them an urgent warning that the Supreme commander had drawn up a list of possible base worlds for the fleet, and Gauder Prime was one of them. Blake saw little other option but to make their attack before the Federation could found them. They departed a week later.  
The day of departure was one of great excitement. A crewmember aboard one of the Wanderers described the sensation:  
"I felt like a boxer who'd been training, sparring and fighting small-time prize fights for years, and finally I was taking a shot at the Federation middleweight title."  
They all felt like that, even Blake. This would be what they were remembered for, not four years on the run, achieving nothing worthwhile. This time, they were taking on the Federation on their own terms, in their own backyard, and from a position of strength.  
Blake leaned back in his command chair at the centre of the bridge, and ran a hand through his unruly mass of dark curls. They could have been cleaner, he realised; personal grooming hadn't been high up on the list of priorities in the last few days. There were always a thousand and one things to sort out at the last minute.  
Come on Roj, he told himself firmly, don't get distracted!  
"Navigator, plot out suitable hyper-jump coordinates for the fleet. Communications, prepare to broadcast to all ships."  
Avon was pacing from one end of the bridge to the other. He was experiencing something he normally managed to avoid. Impatience.  
"All ships, this is Zodiac One," Blake informed them from Aries, the flagship. "You should be receiving the hyperspace coordinates now."  
"It's about time!" Avon snarled. In the name of operational security, nobody but Blake knew where the fleet was aimed at. That was the official story anyhow; Avon couldn't shed a mental picture of Blake putting the names of every inhabited system of the Federation into a hat and picking one out blindfold.  
"Coordinates received, inputting them now," SLAVE reported. "We're invading Earth, by the look of it."  
"Earth!"  
"I think big," Blake replied easily. Avon tried to think of a suitably biting reply, but couldn't. Out of practice, he figured. No matter, there would be plenty opportunities to get back into it...  
  
Orbital Early Warning was a far from exciting post, but the money wasn't bad. And with his oldest child just about to enter school, 2nd Lt Dave Warding needed all the cash he could get his hands on.  
He nodded to the man leaving the radar console, and took over. There was nothing special on the screen, a few freight-only flights heading off somewhere, a biggish passenger liner arriving. Part of Dave's job was to search for any incoming ships, get a visual or IFF confirmation of its identity, and hand it over to civilian or military flight control.  
A dozen new contacts appeared on screen, in precise military formation.  
"Eh? What's this, then?" Warding said to nobody in particular. He switched on his radio system. "Control, this is Sentinel forty-seven. Twelve new contacts in area four-eleven, checking now, over."  
"Roger, sentinel four-seven, we have it on our data feed. Looks like a military flight, but we don't have any scheduled for today. Your basic bureaucratic cock up, I guess, over."  
"Probably," Dave replied. This wouldn't be the first time that nobody bothered to tell Flight Coordination if they were sending ships about. "But I'll check anyway. See if I can find out who they are. I'll try to raise them on the radio, see if they're doing something important. Stand by, out." He tapped away at his keyboard for a moment, calling up a visual feed from one of the small, unmanned proximity sensor posts and putting it on a secondary screen.  
"What the-? Oh, Christ!" Warding slammed his hand down on the emergency alert button. Klaxons screamed all over the small monitoring station, and all over Earth's military bases.  
"Hostile ships inbound! Three cruiser-size ships, unknown type, nine assault carriers, multiple small craft!"  
  
You had to give the remaining defensive fleet credit, for they responded within seconds and with great bravery.  
They didn't have much hope. One light cruiser, two destroyers and a dozen or so assorted frigates were nothing against a fleet this size. But they tried, and tried hard.  
The three Zodiac-class cruisers moved in to engage the defenders directly. The Wanderers stayed a safe distance from the main fracas and used their missiles to take out any ships breaking away to attack them. The gunships, an old type and outclassed by their Federation equivalents, were able only to make the odd strafing run on an enemy capital ship and try to keep out of the way.  
Soon, the battle was dying down. The surviving Federation ships were trying to withdraw, and the way was clear for the landings to begin. The assault carriers dived towards the planet, their ceramic-reinforced bows built to withstand this sort of high-speed re-entry.  
Aboard the carrier Virgo, the two fighter squadrons were getting ready to deploy.  
Once the ship had entered the atmosphere, the fighter squadrons would exit the launch bay alongside numerous small troop transport aircraft from other carriers, which were dropping small assault teams at important military targets. Red squadron would be providing air support for them, while Blue squadron escorted the Wanderers to a safe landing site, where the rest of their force would be offloaded.  
Chris ran through the checklist. Engines lit and idling, radar and electronic-signature scanning systems showing green lights, weapons online. His fighter carried four pods of dumb-fire (unguided) rockets under the wings, two air-to-air missiles on the wingtips, and a cluster bomb dispenser internally.  
His navigator/radar operator/gunner, Gaz, finished his checks and reported that all was green.  
"Red leader to Red section." Chris still felt slightly uncomfortable with this title, unlooked for and unexpected. He'd been a shuttle pilot with one of the mining companies, who'd seen Fed-Sec leave and the gangsters and outlaws move in. Seen the Federation Council shrug when protests about the conduct of the mining companies reached their ears.  
He had resigned on principle after a small village had been destroyed to make way for a new mineshaft. The local criminal population had been used to clear the people out. Chris had used a company shuttle to get them to safety, and resigned exactly fourteen minutes before he could be fired. He'd just happened to fall for a local girl somewhere along the way...  
"We'll be deploying any moment now. You know what to do. Good luck!" Chris was rather pleased with himself for keeping the nervousness out of his voice. The hangar bay doors opened, and a green light flashed twice.  
"Go! Go! Go!" Chris shoved the throttle forward and cut in both afterburners. The others did the same, and the squadron roared out of the launch bay. As they left, they broke formation and whirled off. Troop-transport aircraft followed, more slowly and without the same agility, and aimed themselves at a variety of different targets. It was an awe-inspiring sight.  
  
Aboard one such transport, Avon adjusted his body armour to a less testicle-constricting arrangement and slotted a magazine into his weapon.  
He had insisted on coming, leaving Tarant to handle getting Scorpio down and unloading her consignment of troops. Avon wanted to face the enemy in person.  
"Our target is a maximum security Federation prison facility. Lots of political prisoners who they can't be bothered to ship off to one of the frontier worlds, including several ex-Administration people and a lot of student liberals," Sulin explained. We've got two fighters with us for supporting fire, but backup could be a long time coming. Sniper teams will be parachuting in from another transport."  
"Seems like a lot of effort for a bunch of leftie students and bureaucrats," remarked somebody. Avon smiled faintly.  
"Public relations. A revolution without the support of the common people is nothing but a waste of time," he replied.  
"Well, whatever the political motives are, we're going to take the place over." Sulin briefed them about the layout, guard rotas and other information they had been given by partisan forces already on Earth.  
  
Meanwhile, Chris formed up with the transport and performed a brief barrel roll. Sulin spotted him and blew him a kiss. Chris replied with a brief wave and accelerated towards their objective.  
It was as ugly as you might expect, a gigantic concrete cube with barred windows and a huge steel door, surrounded by a high wall with small watchtowers at each corner. There was a small parade ground/exercise yard bordered unusually by small neat flowerbeds, an aesthetically pleasing prisoner work scheme.  
A small detail of men in grey uniforms was at work on them, watched by a bored-looking warden in standard navy-blue carrying a sidearm and some sort of riot baton. He looked up at the fighters, his puzzlement becoming alarm. Chris paid him no heed, for his attention was drawn to a pair of gun emplacements upon the prison complex's roof.  
As he gazed at them, a sensor picked up Chris's head movement and angled the mouths of the four rocket pods along the line of his gaze. Chris levelled out, and flipped the plastic cover off the fire control on the stick with his thumb. He aimed at one turret, just as it blasted out a solid green beam of energy that sizzled past his port wingtip. Two rockets blew it clean off the building. The other gun lasted only a few seconds longer.  
Troops were running from the building, shooting as they ran. Gaz opened fire with the ventral gun turret, tearing some of them to shreds with nearly a thousand rounds and panicking the others. Chris took a few moments to fire twin streams of energetic plasma into the doors, and then pulled away. His wingman was swinging around all over the sky, and Chris was about to tell her to quit pissing about when he saw the bright twinkling chaff being hurled from her fighter to throw off a missile lock.  
"What in the name of-? Jesus!" Chris's own missile warning cut in, shrieking like a personal-attack alarm inside a dustbin. He dived towards the ground, and headed right at the prison building. Gaz yelled at him to for God's sake pull up! But Chris kept his head, and pulled up to skim the roof of the building, then dived down behind it.  
The missile failed to detect the obstruction, and slammed right into it. It was not up to penetrating metre-thick concrete reinforced with steel, and the only damage it caused was to burn a great chrysanthemum of carbon on the wall.  
"Chris," said Gaz shakily, "you must never, ever do that again. Okay?"  
  
The troop transport came in to hover over the exercise yard. Side doors opened, and guns swung out. Basically similar to the turret-mounted weapons on the Sparrowhawk, they were designed to hurl high-velocity projectiles very rapidly.  
Whilst they provided covering fire, a rear hatch popped open, and the loadmaster (whose role entailed getting the cargo and/or passengers safely on the ground) kicked out a length of rope.  
Avon was first out. He strapped his gun carefully to his body, took a short run at the rope, and dived out, head first, controlling his descent with his thickly gauntleted hands. A few feet from the ground, he gracefully somersaulted and landed on his feet, then dashed towards the remains of the prison's main door.  
Vila followed, in a more conventional manner, and continued to Avon's position.  
"You're nuts!" Vila yelled over the tremendous roar of gunfire and turbine engines set to hover mode, then turned his attention to the door. It was battered, and the upper half hung askew, but it stayed resolutely in the way.  
The others followed. Sulin looked at Avon, her expression tinged with annoyance, surprise and more than a little admiration. He just smiled, wordlessly; any remark would have been lost in the racket. Vila gestured to everyone to get clear, and signalled the transport's pilot with a handheld flashlight.  
The transport carried a rack of four anti-armour missiles under each wing, as well as two laser cannons beneath the cockpit. These latter were fired first, in an effort to melt the door out of their path. This met with failure, so the transport blew it clean across the complex's entry hall with a missile.  
"Couldn't have done better myself!" Vila laughed. The squad split into their usual sub-units, and scoured the facility.  
The wardens offered little resistance, but the military guards fought back bravely. Their heavy-duty body armour necessitated the use of explosive ammunition designed to penetrate before detonating, known to its users as 'punch-and-pop' rounds. The effects were messy but effective, killing almost instantly.  
The prisoners, watching from the barred apertures in their cells, cheered and banged drinking cups against the bars as the battle raged.  
The prison governor sealed the door to his office and dialled up the nearest military command centre on his communications terminal.  
"Command sub-centre halo fifty four," a voice replied.  
"This is prison facility omega-two-seven-bravo. We are under attack, air defences destroyed, heavy infantry casualties! We can't hold the facility on our own, we need reinforcements!"  
"Understood, omega-two-seven-bravo, backup is thirty minutes away," the communications officer on the other end replied.  
"Damn it, we can't hang on that long! We're on the bloody run- Oh shit!" the governor caught a flicker of movement behind the door, and hurled himself to the ground behind his desk. He drew his pistol from its shoulder holster, said a small prayer, and waited a few seconds until the door had been kicked in and a flashbang thrown in. His position of refuge behind the desk muffled the bang, and the governor waited a few seconds before rolling gracefully sideways and coming up firing. One man went down, and another took a direct hit to his body armour. A third managed to fire, shattering the communications terminal and tearing great chunks out of the desk before killing the governor. He switched on his throat mike as he helped his colleague, who had merely been winded.  
"Man down, Corridor B Admin level!" Sulin caught this on her radio, and cursed. Well, if they only lost one man that would be a good result, but not the one she had been hoping for.  
Avon's team had made their way to the solitary block, and were releasing the inmates. The fitter prisoners from the upper levels had been detailed to carry the worse-off prisoners on stretchers to the exercise yard, where a transport waited on medivac duty. Many of the prison's population had been badly beaten, in keeping with the Federation's usual practice.  
Watching the endless stream of bruised, bloody figures being carried to the waiting aircraft, Avon was reminded why men like Blake fought for his cause. Why men like Avon fought for it.  
Avon, Avon... It's me. A voice interrupted Avon's thoughts; a familiar voice, and one that his brain registered without his ears getting involved.  
"Cally? You're alive? Cally!" Avon spun, and saw a familiar figure on one of the stretchers, waiting to be loaded aboard. "Cally. We, I... You're alive!"  
Cally smiled weakly through the bruises covering her face. "Don't feel bad. There was no reason for you to believe I'd survived that explosion. I didn't think I'd survived it for a while." She laughed, and this made her cough painfully. "A Federation follow-up team found me, and brought me back to Earth. I've been in that place ever since." Two medics came over, and picked up her stretcher. "We'll talk later, Avon. It's good to see you again..." She became inaudible, slowly drifting into unconsciousness as one of the medics administered an anaesthetic.  
Avon was left standing there, his mouth open, more emotions than he even knew he had running through his brain.  
  
The President was now extremely angry, and when he was extremely angry the body count reached alarming levels.  
"Military bloody Intelligence never predicted this!" he yelled, hurling a coffee cup at the wall. He swore, helplessly, and slumped back down behind his desk.  
The general staff were avoiding him, but the Supreme Commander was prepared to risk entering his office. He'd weathered enough of Servalan's tantrums over the years to be able to deal with this kind of thing.  
"Mr President, I apologise for the intrusion, but I think you should hear this," he said, keeping his voice even.  
"Okay, I'm listening."  
"I believe that the rebels may have an inside source of information." The President's eyes widened in shock as the implications of this hit him. "A traitor? Here, in Space-Command? God, no wonder they attacked just before we started looking for their base! Do you have any idea who the traitor is?"  
"Not yet," the Supreme Commander growled. "But when I find out, I'll make them beg for death." He paused, as if trying to remember something. "And another thing, I think that Blake is behind all this. Those cruisers look like his old ship, and the rebel activity over the past two years has been coordinated, like somebody had drawn up a timetable. Oh yes, that's Blake's style all right," he said thoughtfully, tapping the metal plate that covered his left eye with his artificial hand...  
Blake's heart filled with a savage, warlike exultation as he read strategic intelligence reports from all over the Federation. On Earth, partisan forces had already routed most of the Federation's surface forces outside the Domes. Extra-system forces were overstretched trying to hold the other worlds, and more resistance groups were springing up every moment.  
"We've got the upper hand. We've actually hit them hard enough to matter!" he murmured to himself, hardly daring to believe it.  
Blake looked at the calendar, and realised that today was actually the first day of Earth's year. The symbolism of this made him smile, and he reached into a cupboard in his cramped cabin aboard Aries (which incidentally was also his star sign) and got out a bottle of brandy and a glass.  
About half an hour later, Vila knocked on Blake's door. "Are you in there? `Cause there's one hell of a party going on in the wardroom if you want to come along," he called.  
"Coming," Blake replied blearily, deciding that if he was going to get even more thoroughly sloshed he might as well do so in the company of friends.  
The party was in full swing by the time Blake arrived. Tarant, Dayna and a few volunteers had festooned the ceiling with paper streamers and balloons, and Chris and Sulin were dancing together on one of the tables. Cally had insisted upon coming, and was sitting away to one side nursing a glass of something fizzy and sickly. She was looking at Avon, who was rhythmically sipping his beer and looking at her, trying to pretend that he wasn't.  
Cally's mind went through its back files, remembering every furtive exchange of glances, every secret smile, every word that they'd exchanged. Resolve hardening, she stood up, walked over to Avon and did something she should have done a long time ago. She kissed him full on the mouth.  
Stunned silence was filled by cheers, mixed with laughter at Avon's expression of complete astonishment. Sulin was laughing so hard she knocked Chris over, and he ended up pulling her down with him. Bruised and giggling, they both got up and went to find another drink.  
Avon's mouth opened and closed furiously without any sound coming out. He was at a loss for words for the first time in history. His libido hastily hit some override switches and took direct control of his body, and directed his arms to encircle the woman from Auron, and for his mouth to interact with hers.  
  
"Our next target is the emergency command bunker used by the military command and the Council," Blake pointed to a location marked on a wall map. "As you may notice, it used to be the official location for Central Control. The defence grid is still in position, but we've come up with a way to deal with that.  
"Bombardment with cluster bombs will damage the grid sufficiently to overwhelm the self-repair system, and we can simply run a few personnel carriers up to the front door and blast our way in."   
"Be careful what- and who- you shoot at in there," Sulin added. "There are a lot of civilian technicians in there and aside from the fact that they're non-combatants, we want the bunker intact and need people who know how everything works."  
"What are the defences like aside from the radiation grid?" asked Vila.  
"We haven't got any hard numbers, but there are sure to be quite a few soldiers inside the facility, and the top brass are sure to have their own bodyguards. What we can be certain of is that the defensive arrangements will be geared towards exactly this kind of attack, so this isn't going to be easy," Blake replied. "We leave in four hours, team leaders will brief their teams individually."  
"We?" said Vila, surprised.  
"Yes, we. I'm going in with you on this one," said Blake. "I've been looking forward to this for a long time."  
"Blake, if you die there will be nobody to lead the resistance groups," warned Avon.  
"Oh, there will. You."  
"Me!" Avon's face went through expressions of disbelief, amusement and finally abject horror. Blake noted this.  
"Well," he remarked genially, "I'll just have to try not to get killed, then."  
  
The bunker was located some way from the Domes, in a pleasant woodland clearing. No anti-aircraft defences, the Sparrowhawk's pilot noted. The Federation could be downright complacent sometimes.  
"Red leader, this is Red seven. Beginning my run now, over."  
"Roger that, be ready to make a break for it as soon as you've completed your attack, they'll call in every fighter for a hundred miles once they figure out what's going on," Chris warned. Red seven dived, flattened out a few feet from the ground, and raced over the bunker. Hundreds of tiny explosions flared behind him, signifying the end of the defence grid.  
An armoured personnel carrier screamed towards the bunker's entrance, turret-mounted cannon blasting the door apart. It handbrake turned, and brought the rear hatch to bear on the ruined door. Black clad figures dropped out and entered the facility.  
"Okay, my team takes this level, team two clear the living quarters. Teams three and four secure the exits! Lets move! Move! Move!" Blake was getting into the swing of things. He set his gun to burst and put a heavy combat boot through the nearest door, weapon raised. Two Federation soldiers turned around, their expressions unreadable beneath their heavy respirator helmets but presumably one of surprise. Blake hardly paused, pulling the trigger twice. Both were killed instantly, the vicious 'punch-and-pop' rounds exploding in their chest cavities and disintegrating their internal organs.  
"Clear!"  
  
So it went for the next hour. The civilian technicians simply threw up their hands and gave themselves up, but the soldiers fought back as hard as they could and took heavy casualties. The important personages taking refuge in the bunker were encouraged to use an emergency escape tunnel leading several miles away, but "Phoenix's" last transmission had informed them of its location and a sniper team were staking it out.  
  
The Supreme Commander would not run. He was too much of a soldier for that. He obtained a rifle from a deceased guard, checked it was fully charged, and knelt behind a computer console awaiting the arrival of Blake's forces. He didn't have to wait long.  
A flashbang erupted just inside the doorway, and a burst of fire followed it. Shrapnel and slivers of glass flew across the room as a computer terminal exploded.  
The Supreme Commander recovered from the flashbang's effects remarkably quickly, and came up firing. One man was killed, his brains spraying over the back wall. Two others fell with shots absorbed by their body armour but powerful enough to floor them, and the Supreme Commander realised that he needed to aim for the head.  
Blake's eyes widened in recognition, and then darkened with hate.  
"TRAVIS!" he bellowed, swinging his gun around. Travis, disgraced war criminal and collaborator with an alien enemy hell-bent on exterminating humanity, was still alive and the Supreme goddamn Commander! God alone knew how he had survived being shot, falling down a hole and then having the planet he was on blown up, but Blake was determined to get rid of him for good this time.  
Everything slowed down for Blake. He saw Travis raise his weapon in an almost leisurely fashion, and lined up his sights perfectly. To Travis he moved almost too fast to see, and fired one round. Travis's rifle literally exploded, hurling wickedly sharp fragments of metal and plastic into his cheek. Travis screamed and clutched at his face, bringing his artificial hand up. The laughable gemstone ring glowed, and an invisible stream of highly energetic particles tore into Blake's body armour and knocked him to the ground, his gun clattering to the floor out of reach. Travis moved in, preparing to administer the coup de gras, but Blake scythed his feet from beneath him with his leg and came up with his sidearm drawn. The rest of the team recovered their senses and cornered Travis.  
Travis stood up, slowly, and raised his hands. The quartet of weapons did not move a millimetre, pointing squarely at his head.  
"Would you shoot an unarmed man who's surrendered?" Travis sneered. Blake raised his sidearm, his face totally expressionless. Slowly and methodically he exchanged the clip for one containing hollow-point projectiles.  
For the first time, Travis knew fear. He saw nothing in those brown eyes, not even anger. Just emptiness. The layer of bravado cracked, and Travis began to sag inwards. Suddenly he looked much smaller, and like a human being rather than a half-machine superman. But there was no pity in the eyes of the men and women who held their weapons on him.  
"Oh, I see what you mean. Like you shot thirty men and women who never even raised a hand to defend themselves?" Even Blake's voice was empty, cold. "Who just wanted their freedom?"  
He aimed the gun downwards, and fired once. The round caught Travis in the stomach, fragmenting and tearing his insides apart. Not enough to kill instantly, but to guarantee death, eventually.  
"You have a few minutes left," said Blake conversationally, "so I suggest you use them to give a little thought to what you did to deserve this. And you'd better hope that whatever higher authority you will be answering to has more compassion than me. See you in hell, Travis." He turned to the others. "Come on, there's still half the base to search!"  
They moved on, leaving Travis where he was. He was still there when Federation reinforcements burst in, and found him on his knees clutching his stomach and trying to hold his intestines in. An officer handed Travis his sidearm, receiving unspoken thanks.  
Travis put the small gun in his mouth, and began to ease the trigger. "Our Father... who art in..." he gasped, as he fired.  
  
The motley assortment of dignitaries grasped what weapons they had managed to obtain and pelted for the exit to the tunnel. At least four soldiers were in pursuit, and gaining.  
"Come on, Mr President, we're nearly there!" gasped 'Commissioner Slear', not daring to look behind her. They saw a slightly brighter set of lights up ahead, and accelerated.  
The hatch was unlocked, relying on secrecy and the unpleasantness of the damp and poorly lit tunnel for security. A senior Council member wrestled with the release mechanism, which was badly in need of better lubrication.  
"It's stuck! Give me a hand, someone!" he hissed. Another man raised his pistol, aiming for the hinges. "Get out of the way, that hatch weighs ninety kilos," he warned. The others stood well clear of the hatch, and he fired twice. The huge steel hinges lost a small but significant amount of their atomic integrity, and sheared. The hatch, its holding bar unable to support its weight, crashed to the ground with a noise like a bell falling out of a church tower.  
The dignitaries climbed gratefully out into a small outbuilding, and rifled the storage compartments within for decent walking equipment, weapons and navigational computers. The President selected a small grenade, and tossed it lightly down the hatchway.  
"Its set to detonate on proximity," he explained. "With any luck it'll bring the tunnel down behind us and buy a bit of time. We'd better start walking, and quickly."  
"Wouldn't we be better off waiting until nightfall?" suggested 'Slear'.  
"At this time of year? We'd be dead of exposure before we got three miles. If we can keep up a steady pace we'll make the nearest Dome by sunset." The President strode confidently out of the door.  
  
High up in his position, a sniper levelled his weapon at the doorway. His spotter tapped the ground twice with a twig; targets sighted.  
"Sniper one to control. Have eyes-on the President, sights are hot."  
"Roger that sniper one, you are weapons-free. I say again, you are weapons-free."  
  
The first thing anybody knew was when the President fell, a cloud of pink spraying out from the back of his head. The shot, a solid fuel propelled projectile that was less a bullet than a rocket, splashed off the concrete floor of the hut and pierced the wall.  
"Jesus! Where the hell did that come from!" said 'Slear'.  
"There must be a marksman out there somewhere. We'll have to go back down the tunnel."  
"There's a proximity-detonated grenade down there, you tit!"  
"Well then let's chuck somebody we don't need down first!"  
"Good of you to volunteer," remarked 'Slear' dryly.  
" Ha, ha! Look, this is pointless. Can we all please stop bickering and try to think of something constructive we can do!"  
Vaughn, the late President's Chief of Staff, came up with the most helpful idea. "We all surrender!" he shouted to the distant sniper (who had a powerful sound detector for exactly this circumstance), throwing as many weapons as he could lift out of the door. The others looked at each other, and followed suit entirely without comment.  
"OK," an unseen voice called through a loudhailer. "Walk out of the building in single file with your hands raised, then I want you all face down with your hands behind your heads. And not that close to the guns, you fool!" Vaughn moved a few yards to the left.  
"Nice try, mate. Now, stay exactly like that until our people arrive." A tiny red spot of laser light began moving slowly back and forth, for psychological effect mostly as the sniper could hit a man in his ten-ring from two miles without any help from fancy laser sighting kit, auto-tracking systems or other such rubbish.  
Suddenly, there was a tremendous explosion and a huge cloud of dust burst from the door of the hut. The proximity grenade had done its work.  
"The person who planted that," said the voice on the other end of the loudhailer rather coldly, "can expect to have his or her life made a complete misery like only a Rim-worlder knows how. AND YOU CAN ALL STOP SMIRKING LIKE THAT!" This whole business was becoming a complete farce.  
  
By the next day, Blake's forces had gained a definite foothold. The Council, torn apart by interpersonal rivalries (courtesy of a little encouragement by "Phoenix"), was hopelessly divided and ineffectual. They had turned military command over to Space Command, which despite the loss of its talented but psychopathic Supreme Commander was reacting ably to the crisis.  
A committee, convened to supervise the overall defence of the Federation, was meeting to decide the issue of defence and eventual counterattack.  
"I've assembled a strategic analysis of our defence capability," explained a junior member. He switched on the display screen at one end of the conference room, revealing a map of the Federation. Inhabited systems that were sufficiently defended to hold off Blake's taskforce were coloured blue, systems at risk were yellow and indefensible systems were red. There was a lot of red.  
"Abandoning the indefensible planets is inevitable, sirs, and we'll lose them anyway. To defend the maximum number of systems would necessitate doing this:" A large portion of the yellow-coloured worlds and two or three blue ones turned red. The remainder turned blue.  
"But that will mean abandoning nearly eighty percent of the Federation!" exclaimed a member of the committee.  
"Not doing this will mean we lose one hundred percent of it," replied another. "We have no choice, for I hold out no hope of negotiation with these rebels."  
"This course of action will buy us perhaps three years before these 'rebels', who have a fair amount of vocal if not military support from numerous independent worlds, get together enough of a fleet to wipe us off the face of the universe," the man with the strategic projection concluded gloomily. "Gentlemen, we're stuffed."  
  
Whilst this was going on, the Federation Council was addressing other issues.  
There were a number of contingency plans set out for this precise eventuality; the Federation had the sort of bureaucracy that made contingency plans for just about every eventuality short of an entire planet suddenly turning into banana fruitcake, but these contingency plans generally called for ships the Federation didn't have to do things they weren't designed to do and occasionally by technological processes nobody had invented yet.  
Another problem was that since the various committees and subcommittees involved were generally designing these strategies for their own amusement they rarely bothered to tell anybody about them until after the emergency they were designed for had happened, by which point it was of course usually far too late.  
  
The brighter members of the Council had contrived to put Space Command in charge of the actual business of warfare, whilst they bickered incessantly but harmlessly about who was to blame for all this.  
This also kept everybody's mind off Space Command's decision to abandon most of the Federation in order to defend the more important worlds. Most of the senators present were increasingly worried by the fact that they were, strictly speaking, out of a job. A good therapeutic argument was terribly helpful in keeping them from fretting.  
  
'Phoenix' was feeling rather smug. The bunch of fusty old twerps hardly needed any encouragement at all! They were so hopelessly divided- those whose worlds were being defended were being treated rather nastily- and no two members seemed to believe the same entity was to blame. They were all trading insults and imprecations and sniping at each other over some frivolous technicality about the minutes of the last meeting, which had to be heavily edited as it was to get all the personal abuse out. 'Phoenix' hardly needed to intervene at all; the odd carefully placed snide remark and a few whispered conspiracy theories were all that was needed to keep the pot on the boil. Being captured by the rebels hadn't mattered in the slightest.  
To be honest, the money wasn't the real reason for 'Phoenix' offering her services. She had, through a combination of unlikely circumstances involving alien vampire sand with murder on its mind (look, it doesn't make any more sense to me!) and a member of Liberator's crew, obtained a conscience. She had spent a long while analysing her actions, and was far from proud of many of the things she had done over the years. Returning to the faith of her childhood, she had resolved to make amends.  
In short, Servalan had got religion.  
No, Blake didn't believe a word of it either. When the head of the prison facility captured in the initial attack and turned to housing POWs reported seeing Servalan praying for forgiveness he'd nearly fallen off his chair for laughing. Tarant had taken this a little more seriously, and gone to visit her.  
  
The cell door opened with a menacing creak, but this was only proper for cell doors in this kind of place. Servalan looked up, and smiled.  
"So Blake let you visit, then. I am surprised."  
"He doesn't know I'm here," Tarant replied with a slightly rueful grin. "He thinks it's all an act. You certainly seemed to be your old self again when you did us out of ten million credits in gold bullion."  
"Ah, yes, I remember that. Avon having an off-day, was it?" Tarant explained about Vila's little Christmas prank. Avon had never really been the same again after the punch.  
"Or it might have been the glue they used keeping the false beard on. I'm not sure," he concluded with a winning smile. "If he found out I told you about that he'd kill us both."  
"He'd have to take a number," Servalan replied, bitterness creeping into her tone. "There's Dayna, probably Blake as well. Hell, I sat and watched your brother die for the sake of a public spectacle!" She pounded the wall of the cell with her fist, and then broke down in tears. "You've got as much reason to kill me as anybody else out there!"  
Tarant sat on the edge of the small bunk that was the cell's only furniture. His arms found her, and he gently pulled her upright. "No I haven't," he breathed, and he gently moved his lips onto hers.  
Unfortunately for Tarant, he was ignorant of three things:  
1. Blake did know exactly where he was and what he was doing, and had had all the relevant details given to him by the others. He wasn't sure he believed half of them, but none the less he knew all that there was to know.  
2. Servalan's cell had a hidden CCTV camera complete with microphone installed at Blake's bequest.  
3. Both Blake and Avon were monitoring it from their newly acquired command centre.  
  
"I'll kill him! Of all the traitorous..." Further remarks made by Avon at this juncture are quite unprintable.  
"Do you want to shut up?" Blake interjected angrily. He was worried about two things; was Tarant's loyalty in doubt? And what the hell was he going to do if Dayna found out about this?  
"Hey, what are you two doing in...? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN THAT CELL?" Blake suppressed a groan. He was about to find out exactly what Dayna was going to do if she found out, because she just had found out.  
"If I told you that Servalan has got religion and is truly and genuinely repentant," Tarant said, looking into the camera he had just noticed, "what would you say?"  
"I'd say you were utterly mad," Dayna replied coldly.  
  
Blake was forced to give Tarant and Dayna tasks at opposite ends of their next big objective.  
On Earth and the majority of the major colonies, huge single buildings contained entire cities and were known as Domes because of their shape. The vast majority of Earth's population lived in these, kept docile by suppressants in the food and water. This made rousing support for the revolution difficult.  
However, every society has its privileged few, no matter how much they deny it. On Earth, most of there were housed in a conventional 'outdoor' city a long way from the Domes. Most of the administrators lived and worked there, as well as the top brass in the military. Blake had decided to shake the bigwigs up a bit.  
  
Company Sergeant-Major Cal Nasser was severely in need of a long holiday. He was sick of this city, sick of the stuck-up twits living in it, and sick of trying to fight a war in support of a load of incompetent, narrow-minded and often downright evil bastards.  
He was tasked with organising patrols, keeping the men in line and enforcing the various restrictions on certain drinking establishments declared off-limits to Other Ranks. This much hadn't changed in the history of warfare; officers were generally in place to take the salutes and handle the paperwork whilst the sergeants actually ran the regiments  
Nasser's captain was currently engaged in sorting out the payroll, having long ago come to terms with his role. An officer's job, so far as all parties were concerned, was to stop too many official documents getting through to the CSM and preventing any actual soldiering getting done. This suited the captain, a bookish youth who fainted at the sight of blood, right down to the ground and seventy feet below it.  
Right at this minute, however, Nasser was quite tempted to let the captain do a bit of soldiering for once. There had been three air attack warnings, all false alarms but urgent enough to warrant sounding the siren. People were getting quite sarcastic about it, and a number of local people had turned up to complain.  
Four men had deserted, taking a quite expensive skimmer with them, and that would lead to paperwork that Nasser would have to do. No good expecting the captain to handle it, he was already snowed under. And then there was that worrying epidemic that seemed to be hitting the younger men hard, though given the nature of the affliction this seemed inevitable.  
Entire platoons were reporting sick with the pox, and nobody seemed to know where they'd got it. The MO was far from amused. He had gone as far as to advise sufferers to dip the affected extremity in boiling water, and those who had followed his suggestion had certainly been cured but... well, you go figure.  
Nasser reached a decision. "Right, sod it. Corporal!"  
"Yessir?"  
"I'm taking a squad out on patrol. Find sergeant Garrett and tell him he's in charge until I get back. He can deal with a few false air raid alerts and venereal disease outbreaks and see if he still wants my job when I retire."  
"Bet you twenty credits, sarge?" suggested the hapless corporal. Garrett was known for his ambition and cold-blooded ruthlessness throughout the regiment; by Federation standards that was practically the definition of officer material.  
"Hah! If I could afford to place a hopeless bet like that I'd be an officer, lad."  
  
Two hours later, Nasser was leading a small patrol through a side street, avoiding stepping in anything horrible as best they could. Nasser was quite happy; dodging heaps of multi-hued incontinence by assorted domesticated creatures from around the galaxy (including one type that melted holes in the pavement) was a pretty minor trouble compared to some.  
"Sergeant-Major, we've had another alert," reported his radio.  
"Garrett can sort it out, probably just some constipated scanner-monitoring technician playing silly buggers- Oh my gad!" A fighter raced low across the city, guns blasting. Suddenly, there was a tremendous crash of thunder and bolt of lightning shot out from the ground and blew the fighter apart! That was not a normal occurrence.  
"What the hell just happened?"  
  
About three miles away, a weapon test had just been completed.   
Atop a small gantry, which rested on the back of a flatbed skimmer, were four huge static generators and a single turret, in which was mounted a triple-pronged emitter. The turret swung towards a specially built blockhouse, and waited for a moment while it charged up.  
"Are we going to get into trouble for shooting at that fighter?"  
"Nah, they'll probably be dead impressed. It proves the electron ram works, anyhow."  
"Yep, that it does."  
The emitter unleashed a blast of alpha and beta radiation, and suddenly the blockhouse was highly conductive to electricity. The four static generators unleashed crackling bursts of lightning and blew the blockhouse apart.  
  
The city was in uproar. The defence forces were blocking the roads, setting up firebases and trying not to look utterly terrified, whilst the civilian population were building barricades and generally getting in the way.  
Blake's tank units were moving into the city without much difficulty. Barricades required only one solid hit with a high-explosive shell to clear them, and the soldiers put up little resistance. Troops following the armour mopped up the larger concentrations, and all the time above them fighters roared overhead locked in a desperate battle.  
  
"Heads up red three! You've got one on your tail!" Chris heard red three's acknowledgement as he came in behind an ADF 21 and raked it with gunfire. The pilot ejected and the fighter exploded. Chris grinned savagely, and dived at a larger barricade. Cluster bombs scattered from his craft, shattering the barricade and those manning it.  
"Scratch one barricade... what the hell!" A bolt of lightning sizzled past, blowing a nearby Sparrowhawk apart.  
"WHAT THE ------- HELL WAS THAT?" screamed Gaz.  
From his command vehicle, Blake stared at the monitor in horrified disbelief. Alpha and Beta particle readings had just jumped, and a huge bolt of lightning had shot down a fighter. This must be some kind of new weapon.  
"It's an electron ram. I tried building one of these once, but I never got the ioniser to direct the particles right," Dayna explained. Avon smiled slightly.  
"Oh, I remember that. It fed back and blew a thirty foot hole in the ground." Painful recollections of glowing shards of metal hurtling overhead came back to haunt him, and he examined the small scar where a larger chunk had hit his arm.  
"Well, whatever it is we have to put it out of action before we're wiped out," said Blake. "Fighters can't get close, that's for sure, and any vehicle would be blown apart. Hmm... Sulin, could your unit get close enough to destroy that thing, and pretty soon?"  
"On foot it would take half an hour, and that's if it doesn't go anywhere." Sulin pulled her blonde hair out of her eyes and thought hard. "Maybe in a transport, if we stayed below the height of the buildings and kept out of their line of sight."  
"We don't have to get close," Dayna interjected. "If I could get within about a quarter mile from wherever it's set up I could knock the end off the ioniser with an explosive round from a good sniper rifle. If I don't destroy it outright it certainly won't be able to fire for a good while."  
"Alright, we'll give it a try. Next time that thing fires we should be able to pinpoint its position," Blake replied. He lit a cigarette and turned his attention to the battle.  
  
Alarms began to sound in the prison facility as the skimmer lifted off. Servalan said some very unladylike words under her breath, and accelerated, but the prisoner transport skimmer was built to be hard to get out of rather than easy to get away in, and its armour weighed nearly as much as a small aircraft. Oh well, everything went to plan there should be a Federation interceptor unit en route to cover her escape.  
She just had to hope that Blake had warned his forces about the plan.  
  
Much of the city was a battleground, strewn with wrecked vehicles and pockmarked with shrapnel and projectile impacts. Few windows retained their glass. There had been little really serious building damage, however. Blake had issued dire threats regarding such matters.  
Sulin's squad made ready; they were close to their landing site. The transport's pilot was more than a little relieved that his charges were planning to disembark in a normal manner, as opposed to fast-roping one at a time whilst every Federation soldier and volunteer for miles around let fly with whatever weapon they had to hand in their direction.  
As they disembarked, Sulin noticed a prison skimmer as it screamed overhead towards the building occupied by the remaining military force. An escaped POW, she concluded. It wasn't high on her list of priorities right now, and she banished it from her mind.  
"Can you see anywhere you can get a shot?" she asked Dayna.  
"That apartment block over there," Dayna replied, pointing.  
"Right. Come on, then."  
  
The prison skimmer, piloted rather inexpertly by somebody who had spent so long being chauffeured about she had forgotten most of her driving skills, misjudged a sharp turn and ploughed into the fourth-storey window of the building. Fortunately the troops were largely occupying the upper two floors and everything below the eighth floor was deserted. The transport came to rest intact amid a mass of wreckage  
Servalan found a bottle of whiskey in the glove compartment of the transport, and took a long pull from it.  
Several soldiers appeared at a run as Servalan exited the vehicle. "Hey, lady!" exclaimed their NCO, "What the hell are you trying to do?"  
"Well, I'd like to see you find somewhere to park outside," Servalan replied, totally deadpan. The NCO was completely unmoved, and his squad turned out to be mutiods. And it was such a good line, too.  
"I need to speak to whoever is in charge," Servalan continued.  
"That'd be Major Brant-," began the NCO, but Servalan cut him off.  
"Not the senior officer, man, the person in charge for real, not some paperwork merchant!" Even the mutiods were impressed; this showed an understanding of the military power structure that you rarely saw in a civilian.  
"Ah, you want the CSM, then. This way please."  
  
Company Sergeant-Major Nasser was a man sorely put-upon. He was not in the mood for this kind of lunatic joyriding, and fixed Servalan with a baleful eye as he shuffled a heap of radio transcripts from intercepted enemy communications.  
"There had better be a very good reason for you wrecking about a hundred square metres of prime office space, or a Board of Inquiry will have us both shot." He continued in a fractionally warmer voice as he recognised the woman who had just entered his office.  
"Commissioner Slear, of the Federation Security Service? We may have met once; I was on your security detail for a while before I was promoted. I was also once bodyguard of Supreme Commander Servalan." Servalan's face did not flicker.  
"I remember her; unpleasant woman, and always overdressed." Nasser restrained himself from saying anything at this point.  
"I must apologise for my rather dramatic entry, sergeant. In escaping from the rebel prison camp I caused a fair amount of damage and Blake was most childish about it. With a dozen surface-to-air weapons trying to lock on to me I was unable to respect the niceties of local parking regulations." Nasser smiled slightly at this.  
"Well, I'm sure the building's insurance covers this kind of thing. I take it you are here seeking refuge from the invading hordes?"  
"Yes. I'm afraid that I have little information about the tactical state of play, but I shall be certain to stay out of your way and not get it into my head to start issuing freelance orders. Thank you for your assistance, sergeant." Nasser began to wonder if his suspicions had been correct, but decided to worry about such matters after he was safely out of the battle zone and not before.  
  
"Sniper one to control. Target acquired. Should I fire?"  
"Negative, stand by. Red leader?"  
"Confirmed. Package has been delivered."  
"Roger that," Blake replied, pressing a button on his desk.  
Aboard the prison skimmer, a small radio receiver picked up an instruction, which it relayed to the large block of plastic explosive hidden beneath the chassis. The explosion blew out every window, collapsed the fifth floor into the fourth, and then collapsed the fourth into the third.  
  
On the roof, Servalan paused in her examination of the electron ram and dived for cover.  
Dayna lined her sights up on the tip of the ioniser and fired. The entire gun mechanism suddenly became negatively polarised, and the static generators, which had been kept fully charged, obeyed physics. The turret exploded into a billion white-hot fragments.  
Dayna cursed mentally; she had hoped there would be more left for her to have a look at. She still hadn't figured out where she had gone wrong with her effort at something similar.  
  
Servalan carefully checked herself for shrapnel injuries and got to her feet. Nasser appeared with several men, weapons drawn, and Nasser grabbed a handful of her prison-issue boiler suit and hauled her to her feet.  
"Commissioner, I don't know if you are responsible for that bomb, but until I get to the bottom of this you are under close arrest. Come with me!" Servalan fixed her iciest stare upon the unfortunate CSM.  
"Sergeant Nasser, I will NOT be threatened by you or - What the hell's that fighter doing?"  
A Sparrowhawk roared over the building and banked around hard in a full turn. It slowed and hovered a few metres from the edge of the roof, and Servalan noticed that the front cockpit was empty. She realised distractedly that it had flight controls for both crew, and was just about to stand when the little ventral turret popped out. Nasser bellowed a warning, but it was lost above the deafening roar of gunfire.  
After what seemed like a century, Servalan got to her feet, not daring to look at the gun's devastating effects for fear of vomiting. The fighter moved in, and the forward cockpit hatch popped open.  
"Get in! Come on, move it!" Chris bellowed. Federation fighters were angling in towards the building. Servalan scrambled desperately in, and put on the helmet and respirator she found on the seat. Chris sealed the canopy and slammed the throttles wide open, sideslipping hard. The missile warning began to sound.  
"Right, strap yourself in and don't touch any of the controls," Chris warned, ejecting chaff and flares (magnesium-based devices designed to decoy heat-seeking missiles). "If you press the wrong button we could pile into a building or something."  
"I am a fully qualified pilot, you know," Servalan replied testily. The last few minutes had done nothing to improve her temper.  
"Look, unless you've flown one of these things before I'd rather you didn't have a go at steering in a combat environment, that's all. The controls aren't the Federation's standard layout anyway. Now do you mind letting me get on with rescuing you?" Chris replied without much heat.  
Suddenly, a fighter popped out from behind a row of apartments and raked them with laser fire. The canopy exploded and Chris's control systems blew apart.  
  
"Red leader, are you alright? What is your status, over? Red leader, report your status, over." Blake cursed. "Come in, Red leader!"  
"Blake, it's me. Your pilot has lost his radio link, and I'm flying the aircraft. Can you give me a course and destination?" Blake groaned. SERVALAN was flying the bloody plane!  
"Stand by," he ordered, hastily consulting the radar screen. Chris's fighter was at a safe altitude and another fighter was trying to form with it. There was no immediate danger that Blake could see, but he needed a more comprehensive damage report.  
"OK, steer about twelve degrees to your left. That should point you towards a landing strip. Can you try and put Chris on?"  
Chris ducked his head below the remains of his radar display, grateful for an excuse to get out of the slipstream. Enough of the forward section of the canopy to protect him from the worst of the wind remained intact, but it was pretty uncomfortable all the same.  
After shocking himself twice and having to hold his breath for nearly a minute as he wired up the microphone in his respirator, Chris managed to lash together a working connection to the backup radio.  
"Right, I'm on. Most of our instrumentation is shot to hell, but I don't think we're in immediate danger of crashing. GPS and inertial navigation is down, and fire control won't respond, but the engines and hydraulics are still functioning. There's a slight fuel leak, but we've got enough in the tanks to keep us in the air until we get home, over." Chris switched over to intercom.  
"Right, I need you to put the safety catch for the flare dispenser on. If we start flinging pyrotechnics around the way we're pissing fuel then a few bits might even reach low planetary orbit. The two red buttons under your thumb on the stick."  
"I can see them. There's a plastic cover, it's open at the moment."  
"Right. It's actually two in sections. Just put the right-hand one down, we might need chaff later." Servalan complied.  
"Flare dispenser secured. Blake said we need to turn twelve degrees to port; do you want me to use the rudder or try to bank?"  
"Rudder!" said Chris emphatically. "I've seen a demonstration of your driving skills today and I really don't fancy flying through any buildings, thanks very much."  
Servalan felt somewhat miffed, but decided that today was not the right time to try any fancy aerobatics. Opening the throttle slightly to compensate for the loss of airspeed, she applied gentle pressure on the left rudder pedal. Nothing happened, except for a red light on the instrument panel lighting up.  
Their wingman waved frantically to them and pointed to the rear of the fighter. Chris saw a darker stream of fluid join the leaking fuel.  
"Shit. Blake, trying to turn just made one of the hydraulic leads go kaput, and there's no way in hell I'm going try turning with the throttles after the damage we took. You'd better come up with something pretty fast!"  
"I still have pitch control. If we can make it clear of the city I can probably manage a belly-up landing," Servalan suggested. Chris looked at the paper map he carried in reserve in case the navigation equipment failed-, which it had.  
"Bad idea. Once we clear that forest we'll be right next to Dome Three."  
"Well either that or we eject. The hydraulic systems are going to give out any second now and if I unbalance engine thrust we'll end up in a flat spin. I don't know I can keep us in the air much-"  
Finally, the hydraulics gave out totally. The elevators locked, and the Sparrowhawk pitched up violently. Airspeed began to drop.  
"We're stalling! Open her up, now!" Servalan jammed the throttles forward in an effort to retain some lift in the wing surfaces, but it was too late. The fighter began to suffer massive vibration, and started losing altitude. The 'stall horn' shrieked.  
"It's no good! Eject! Eject!" Chris reached down beneath the seat and pulled the yellow lever that activated the ejection system. The shattered remains of the canopy blew clear and whirled away behind him, and then Chris was yanked into an upright sitting position by the restraint mechanism. Explosive bolts blew him and his seat out into the sky, the restraint harness breaking off a few moments later.  
Chris remembered his training, and assumed a stabilising position to control his tumbling freefall. Comically spreadeagled, he managed to check his rate of drop until the parachute accepted its barometric cue and opened. Once he was drifting down Chris felt a lot better; the most uncomfortable part of an ejection was over and it really was a magnificent view.  
  
He landed quite heavily, never having mastered parachute landings. The canopy caught in some bushes, which caught Chris by surprise and caused him to take a look at his surroundings.  
He was in a park, quite near a small lake. A variety of trees were planted in pleasantly random formations around a wide expanse of grass, and there was even a bandstand.  
The tranquillity of the scene was spoilt somewhat by the sound of distant gunfire, and anyway Chris was in no position to appreciate it. He ignored the parachute; the park keeper could have it as a tarpaulin for the pedaloes or something. Chris equipped himself with the various items from his survival kit: Extra magazines for his sidearm, map, GPS locator and other such essentials. No teleport bracelets, though. He had no idea why the bracelets were needed; Avon had tried to explain but Chris was a pilot not a scientist.  
Chris dived behind a tree at the sound of marching boots, pistol drawn. Four soldiers in a precise square formation tramped past at the double. Chris reckoned that if he caught them unawares he could take all four down before they could react, but shooting people in the back wasn't his style. They kept going, ignoring the parachute draped across the ground, and Chris moved cautiously in the opposite direction.  
  
Servalan disentangled herself from her own parachute, which had caught on a street lighting fixture, and dropped the remaining six feet to the ground. Fortunately, she was still in prison-issue clothing rather than her usual taste. High heels would have earned her a broken ankle.  
"Stay where you are!" ordered an unseen voice, backed up by a shot and a spurt of dust near Servalan's feet. She raised her hands slowly and carefully.  
"Good," the voice continued. "Now, do you remember a man by the name of Hal Mellanby?" Servalan nodded slowly and carefully. There was a pause. "Hmm, I'd have thought you'd have forgotten. Just one corpse among all the hundreds, thousands even? I'm almost impressed." There was a slight movement from Servalan's left, and Dayna emerged from beneath a carefully contrived hide of debris and loose rubble.  
"I have a long memory," Servalan replied. "I try to forget, or at least I did for a while, but I never quite succeeded. None of those memories are ones I relish, either." Dayna fought down the urge to laugh out loud. "The sympathy thing may have worked on a lovestruck idiot like Del Tarant, but not on me. You'll be trying my father's views about revenge and killing next, I imagine." She reloaded her rifle. "That isn't going to work either." Servalan braced herself. She supposed Dayna was right; gunning down a blind man? Now that kind of nastiness took years of practice and specialist equipment...  
"Hold your fire," Chris interjected quietly. Dayna glared at him. "This is not your concern. Don't tell me she pulled the sympathy trick on YOU as well," she replied icily. Chris sighed.  
"Look, there are about seven thousand Federation soldiers trying to kill all three of us. And what are you doing? Trying to kill each other! Got the math?"  
Dayna considered this briefly. She was about to remark that there was no way in hell that herself and Servalan could ever be referred to as 'us' when everything seemed to happen rather fast. Chris brought his gun to bear on some unknown target, and Servalan launched herself bodily at Dayna. Dayna hit the ground rather painfully, and had a vague impression of a burst of hot air travelling very fast over her head. There was a stifled scream.  
Dayna's mind caught up with events only after her body acted entirely of its own accord and started shooting. Meanwhile Chris, cursing Servalan, Blake, the Federation and everyone else he could think of, picked Servalan up bodily and ran for cover. Dayna saw the wiser course and followed.  
A pilot's survival gear included a fair supply of medical equipment, and Chris was using most of it on the bad wound to Servalan's shoulder. It hadn't been a direct hit, but there were several bone fragments in the bloody mess. Exceeding the recommended morphine dose by a large amount had helped, but not totally.  
"OK, this is going to sting a bit," Chris warned as he applied a liberal squirt of antiseptic spray. Servalan winced a little, but it was barely noticeable beyond the haze of pain. He backed it up with a wad of absorbent and sterile gauze tied in place with bandages. The result was inelegant but functional.  
"All right, that ought to hold. It'll still hurt like hell, but there isn't much chance of you bleeding to death or getting gangrene," Chris reported. "You got lucky."  
"LUCKY!"  
"Yes, lucky that you didn't prang an artery."  
Dayna ducked as another shot burned into the plaster above their heads. This old basement flat wouldn't withstand much more pounding.  
"I've only got one spare bracelet!" she warned, throwing it to Chris. He caught it, and snapped it to Servalan's wrist and screamed into the communicator for teleport. Dayna dropped her rifle in shock, and Chris grabbed it. Two magazines slotted into the hollow stock; 'punch and pop' rounds. His sidearm was carrying less potent ammunition, but he had six spare magazines for it. The federation soldiers besieging them apparently had a portable molecular shift detector, and they knew for certain that there was only one person left in the basement. A continuous volley of fire carried on for several minutes, and Chris tried to respond. He failed.  
  
"I don't believe it," said SLAVE. "ORAC, why didn't you check those coordinates?"  
"You never mentioned the fact that three people were being rescued with only two teleport bracelets. Am I supposed to assume that any of our number would sacrifice their very lives for Servalan?"  
"No, but you could try being a little bit more bloody careful next time, you stupid fishtank!"  
ORAC was still trying to think of a suitably biting reply when Servalan picked him up and hurled him across the bridge. A truly world-class goal dive from Avon saved ORAC from certain destruction.  
"For God's sake, ORAC is incredibly valuable!"  
"More valuable than Chris's life?" asked Dayna. Avon realised what she meant.  
"To the rebellion, yes. ORAC is more important than ANYBODY's life, including mine."  
"If I might interject," said ORAC, "I may be able to recover the coordinates by scanning the surface of the memory chip. It will only take a few seconds."  
"Then for Christ's sake get on with it!" yelled SLAVE. He had never liked ORAC. Before another argument started, however, they received a message from the surface, reporting the capture of a Federation double agent.  
  
Chris was grabbed and dragged roughly out of the holding cell. There was a short walk down an anonymous corridor, and then a brief flight down some stairs. "Ouch."  
"Well, well, well. Bit of a hero, aren't we?" remarked an unseen voice, in a conversational tone. "Pilots are always stupid. Now, what can you tell me about the Federation's deployment positions?"  
"Not much, seeing as I'm not Federation. and my last intelligence briefing was two weeks ago. Sorry I can't be of any help, sir," Chris replied jauntily. He guessed that either his interrogator was interested in discovering the limit of Blake's espionage capabilities or thought he was a deserter.  
"Calling me sir won't help. That Mellanby woman left you for those guards to pick up. She rescued a war criminal instead of you. Do you owe her anything?"  
"Does that mean that if I tell you everything I know, you won't do horrible things to me with electrodes and stuff?" There was a slight pause.  
"No, we'll do it anyway," the Voice replied. "But we might stop a bit sooner."  
"Piss off."  
"You'll think differently after a while, my man. We can be as evil as the Federation when we have to, you know." Chris stared in the direction of the Voice. "Come again? I'm not a military prisoner?"  
"No, of course you aren't you damn fool! The Federation know who their own spies are!"  
"SPY?!?!"  
Proceedings were interrupted at this point by the bleep of a communicator, and a short conversation, punctuated by the words "he WHAT?" and finally by "OK, put him through." The new caller was clearly audible, and very unflattering in their opinion of whichever rebel group Chris was being held by.  
"What the hell are you playing at, you incompetent moron? He's one of ours!"  
"Was I meant to know that?"  
"His picture is on the file we gave you. You only had to check it. Have you learned nothing from 'Bartholomew'?"  
"You leave Anna out of this. I checked the file, all right. It's a good likeness; they must have searched the whole Federation Air Combat force for him, but they didn't get all the details right. He's not the pilot who was shot down."  
"I bloody well am!" shouted Chris. A guard entered the cell dragging another man, who bore a distinct resemblance to Chris but was discernibly a different man. "Sorry, boss, we just found him in the medical wing. We got 'em mixed up; put the real one in the holding area and the fake with the others."  
Del Grant dropped his communicator and glared at the man. His fury was undermined somewhat by the roars of laughter emanating from the communicator's speaker, and from Chris.  
  
It was two days later. Chris and Vila were sat at a table in an anonymous bar in an anonymous part of the Delta levels of Dome Three, waiting for a contact.  
"Is this contact of yours punctual, Vila?" Chris asked rather pensively. They were three minutes short of the agreed rendezvous time. Chris didn't bother to ask if said contact was trustworthy; Vila was many things, but he wasn't stupid.  
"No, but she'll turn up," the thief replied casually. "Another?" Chris regarded his drink critically. "This stuff 'd be better off fuelling my bloody Sparrowhawk! I'll give it a miss, thanks."  
At length, Vila's contact appeared. To Chris's surprise, there was no code word or recognition signal, but they saw one another instantly; presumably because the 'contact' was Vila's mother. She deigned to enjoy a small drink, and set out the plan devised by some of her friends.  
"We've recruited several dozen people we can trust; they're supposed to nominate as many others as they can. Our last estimate put numbers at around four hundred; can you provide weapons for all of them?" Vila looked unsure.  
"Mum, do you mean you can trust them not to call Fed-Sec, or that you can trust them with guns? Blake will not be happy with us if you set a bunch of raving psychos loose in the Alpha levels with enough firepower to take Space Central."  
"If they were real crazed killers they'd be in the military, wouldn't they, Vilakins?" Mrs Restal suggested. Vila blushed visibly. Chris restrained Avon from making some remark with a glare.  
"Anyway," Mrs Restal continued firmly, "we need those weapons as soon as you can provide them, tonight if possible."  
"We'd have to clear this with Blake, and our supplies of weaponry is finite, but we ought to be able to manage something," Chris replied. "The only problem is that he's becoming downright anal-retentive about keeping track of everything. There have to be procedures, otherwise logistics would be hoipeless. It's complicated enough."  
"The upshot is that we can't give you anything tonight," Avon explained. "I'd appreciate a better idea of exact numbers, and the kind of people we're dealing with. You get all sorts in these levels." Nobody said the words 'snotty Alpha' but they hung over the table like the dense cloud of tobacco smoke the ceiling fan couldn't quite dispel.  
"I can manage that, certainly," Mrs Restal replied somewhat huffily.  
"Avon," Chris said in measured, reasonable tones that hid growing annoyance, "can I ask you to exercise a little more tact when addressing the people we're meant to be emancipating?"  
"Yes, you can ask," Avon replied coolly. The implication was clear that this didn't mean he would comply. Vila sighed, and exchanged glances with his mother. She shrugged. 


End file.
